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Posts Tagged ‘participatory culture’

I hate Microsoft (but I kinda like its ad campaigns)

Mar 23rd, 09 / 2 Comments

I encountered this pure, shameless propaganda for a new Microsoft product funny commercial over at Talent imitates, genius steals.

The blog’s author, Faris Yakob, does a fantastic job of zeroing right in on what’s going on with this commercial. As he explains, “The cool thing about being this huge gray corporation is that every time you don’t act like it, it’s awesome.”

It’s true: If a company makes awesome commercials, we’ll overlook or forget that, for example, Microsoft’s abysmal environmental record secured its position at the second from the bottom in Greenpeace’s Greener Electronics Guide.

Microsoft appears to be banking on the “coolness” strategy to make us forget their unofficial corporate mantra: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. And, in fact, to forget the host of criticisms leveled at Microsoft for unethical, unfair, or even outright criminal business practices.

In a previous post, I outed myself as a fan of the Open Source Software (OSS) movement, a movement that appeals to my secret libertarian streak. The open source movement also happens to make neat commercial campaigns.

Now, here’s the issue that the OSS movement has yet to overcome: I am fully convinced, yet I continue to use Microsoft products in my daily life. It’s easier, after all, than figuring out the details of installing, say, Linux on my laptop. It’s easier to use Microsoft Word for my word processing needs, even though OpenOffice, as its homepage explains,

is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

Easy, compatible, open source, free. Yet I’m not using it. The dangerous entropy of apathy, my friends, is the issue that the OSS movement has yet to overcome.

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The awesomeness going down at Project New Media Literacies

Mar 11th, 09 / 1 Comment

Something amazing is happening over at the blog for Project New Media Literacies, and I’m not saying this just because I’ve been involved in it.

Well, okay, I’m saying this just because I’ve been involved in it. But it’s still amazing.

As I explained in a previous post, I’ve been working on a series of blogposts about spreadable educational practices with my sensei, Dan Hickey, and my mentor and partner in crime, Michelle Honeyford.

Our first post, “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Current Educational Practice,” argued that the concepts of spreadable media outlined by media scholar Henry Jenkins (and first taken up in sleeping alone here) translate to the educational practices and policies as well. We argued that disseminated instructional routines (DIRs), the materials developed and distributed (most commonly by government agencies) with the intention of strict adherence to the curricula, often fails because:

“fidelity” to the curricular intent is often impossible, not only because of classroom variables but because the intent is not always clear to or valued by the teacher in her or his specific context;
there is little to no motivation for teachers to spread these practices to other teachers;
the inherent promise&#8212do this and your students will do better on the required standardized test&#8212is not only a false promise but also runs counter to teachers’ efforts to foster real learning beyond testing skills.

In our second post, “If it Doesn’t Spread, It’s Current Educational Practice (Part Two): Distributed Instructional Routines vs. Spreadable Educational Practices,” we continue the argument by examining the contrast between thinking about “lesson plans that work” (DIRs) and “practices that work” (Spreadable Educational Practices, or SEPs). On a fundamental level, shifting the conversation to SEPs allows us to switch lenses: Now we get to consider the teacher’s role as an expert on learning instead of focusing on the best methods for handing out materials that work independent of context, independent of teacher, independent of community needs.

In the DIR model, the teacher is a kind of mainframe computer: You feed the information in; the teacher computes it and spits it out. In the SEP model, things get much more complicated. First, if you want to really think about spreadability, you have to think about how practices spread both in the classroom between students–after all, a practice only “works” when it’s taken up enthusiastically by the class as a whole–and from teacher to teacher outside of the classroom.

As we write over at the NML blog:

The notion of spreadability leads media scholars to ask about the aspects of the media environment that support the spread of media across different communities. They ask about the ways consumers create value for themselves, the properties of content that lead to spread, and how companies can benefit from spread. If we translate this notion to educational practices, spreadability might describe how properties of students, teachers, content, and accountability work together to enable circulation of mutually meaningful practices in a networked educational culture. For us, the notion of spread raises four questions about educational practices:

What aspects of the academic learning environment (i.e., in-school and about-school) support the spread of practices across different educational communities?

How do students and teachers create value for themselves and for their schools through their spread of practices?

What properties of practices make them more likely to be spread?

How do teachers and schools benefit from the spread of their practices?

What makes this big is that it can help us clear away the technology fetish–what’s the newest technology? How can we get it into classrooms so we can transform education?–and make space for the real question: How can school prepare learners for future schooling, work, and life in a society whose values, systems, and very structures are under constant question as a result of the technologies that have transformed how we are as a culture? We write:

[A]s new tools and technologies are rapidly transforming when, why, and how we communicate, circulate ideas, connect with others, and produce new materials independently and in collaboration with others, there is a value in examining which elements of an educational practice wither and which are appropriated for the new contexts and tools that await us just past the limits of our vision. While a practice that supports activities within Wikipedia will certainly fade as wiki editing becomes more common outside of the context of formal education, on a basic level, the mindsets and skillsets that allow for wider collaboration within this type of community not only remain in our social memory but remain valuable for whatever values and practices emerge from the widespread adoption of such a tool.

The ultimate goal of education, after all, is to arm all members of our society with the ability to transform their environments as they see fit. Gee writes that “humans at their best are always open to rethinking, to imagining newer and better, more just and more beautiful words and worlds. That is why good teaching is ultimately a moral act.” This is why, too, good teaching&#8212and by extension, good educational research&#8212requires deconstruction and deep examination of educational practices&#8212and, through this examination, an ongoing discovery of what would best serve the moral imperative of teaching toward a more just and more beautiful society.

I’m serious, you guys. This is gonna be really really big. And when it happens, don’t say I didn’t tell you so. And this is how I feel about it:

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Conquering the blogosphere, one blogger at a time (and revisiting the Facebook fracas)

Mar 7th, 09 / 2 Comments

I recently learned that sleeping alone has a follower in the Spanish-speaking world. Over at Castor ex Machina, a blog run by a Peruvian college student named Eduardo, a big chunk of my recent post on the battle over Facebook’s terms of service agreement got translated and discussed in a post titled “El affaire Facebook y sus posibles interpretaciones” (“The Facebook affair and its possible interpretations”).

I don’t speak Spanish, so I’m relying on my years of studying other languages, along with a variety of incredibly bad website translators (about which more soon) and, I hope, the reading public of sleeping alone to help. Eduardo writes:

Pero uno de los problemas que me viene a la mente, también, es uno muy básico: Facebook no es un espacio público, es un espacio no sólo privado, sino cuyo sentido de fondo es, también, un sentido económico/comercial. No es que esto, de plano, sea un problema: pero, ¿cómo transforma esto nuestra idea de lo que es un espacio público? Si mañana Facebook quebrara, toda la información, toda la creación, todas las interacciones que existen en el sitio, desaparecerían. ¿El Estado benefactor, entonces, debería preservar este espacio? ¿Es un patrimonio compartido? Y por otro lado, ¿es acaso posible concebir un esfuerzo similar llevado adelante de un modo y por una motivación que no fueran privados?

I believe the (very loose) translation of this paragraph is something like:

But one problem that comes to mind is a very basic one: Facebook is not a public space. It’s a privately owned space, one with economic/commercial motives. This isn’t on the face of things a problem, but it does give rise to the question: How does Facebook transform our vision of what a public space is? If Facebook failed tomorrow, all the information, all the creations, all the interactions that exist on the site would disappear. Should the government, then, preserve this space? Or is it a shared heritage? And on the other hand, is it possible to conceive of a similar effort carried out in a manner and for reasons that are not commercial?

I do suspect this is a relatively poor translation, and I hope that if Eduardo or other Spanish speakers read this they will help me adhere more closely to the spirit of the passage.

As it is, though, I do think I get a good general sense of what Eduardo is arguing here: Facebook may feel public, but it’s run by private interests whose values and motives do not always necessarily align with those of the population of the space. Because Facebook feels like it’s ours, tension arises when we’re notified that we don’t have quite as much agency within the Facebook environment as we had believed. It makes us angry; it leads us to action.

If my interpretation of the rest of Eduardo’s post is accurate, he also argues that the action we took in the case of the Facebook battle was in large part conducted by people who had no idea what they were even fighting, and how they were fighting it. Even the response from Facebook during and including the struggle indicated a misunderstanding.

I’ve been quoting Clay Shirky a lot lately, and I’ll just go ahead and do it again. Shirky argues that for a new group to be successful, it must meet three requirements: Promise, tool, and bargain. As he explains,

The promise is the basic “why” for anyone to join or contribute to a group. The tool helps with the “how”–how will the difficulties of coordination be overcome, or at least be held to manageable levels? And the bargain sets the rules of the road: if you are interested in the promise an adopt the tools, what can you expert, and what will be expected of you?

The bargain, Shirky explains, is the hardest to get right because it’s so complex and often unspoken. Shirky gives the example of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales moving the project from a .com site to a .org to indicate his intention not to profit off of the work of contributors. The bargain, then, was this: Wikipedians contribute to the work of Wikipedia, and nobody will exploit that work for monetary gain. Encarta, Microsoft’s effort at getting an online encyclopedia going, failed because its bargain didn’t seem like a bargain:

users had to grant Microsoft permission to “use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat your Submission” for a product Microsoft was going to charge money for.

Shirky explains that “this was hardly a bargain at all, as all the power lay with Microsoft, a fact that made the option for user contribution largely irrelevant.”

For Facebook, we might say the bargain is something like this: Users get a space where they can manage a wide network of friends, family, and professional and personal acquaintances. They get to keep up with the details of the personal and professional lives of their Facebook friends. They have the option of joining groups, playing games, taking public or semi-public stands on issues that matter to them, and gaining access to photos, links, and other online information that is of deep personal interest to them. In return, Facebook gets to ply users with ads and, to a largely unknown extent (at least by most users), gain access to private and often quite personal information.

This does feel like a bargain to us, especially for younger Facebook members whose entire lives have been lived deep in the morass of corporate-sponsored environments. What’s the difference, after all, between attending a sporting event at Coors Field, Invesco Stadium, or Banknorth Gardens and playing Mafia Wars surrounded by ads for whiter teeth and online graduate programs?

Facebook changed the bargain when it suggested that everything users did to contribute to the site was subject to corporate exploitation&#8212even if this was, as posts from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg suggested, a misinterpretation of the revised terms of service, this was how it felt to angry users. Interestingly, Facebook caved to public pressure. They didn’t have to; by now, most Facebook users are hooked and will not leave, no matter how angry they get or how loudly they threaten their mutinies. Presumably, then, Zuckerberg et al. had a sense that users felt that the bargain had been violated, and that resentment over this could have resulted in a public relations nightmare.

It doesn’t matter, then, whether the users were correct in their interpretation of the terms of service change. What matters is how a change in the terms of service changes the perceived bargain, the agreement between the owners and the users of a space that is represented, in theory if not necessarily in practice, as a public one owned by the people who live there. (Now Zuckerberg and his gang are soliciting users to help collaborate on a “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities,” intended to replace the terms of service agreement altogether. You can learn more here.)

Early in this post I promised to elaborate on the issue of ridiculously poor website translators. I don’t have the space in this post to do this, so expect to hear more from me on this issue soon.

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Cross-post: If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Current Educational Practice

Mar 6th, 09 / 2 Comments

Contrary to popular opinion, I do hold down a day job in addition to my blogging responsibilities here at sleeping alone. Fortunately for me, a significant chunk of my day job requires blogging about what I do. Recently, I’ve been working on a series of blogposts about spreadable educational practices with my sensei, Dan Hickey, and my mentor and partner in crime, Michelle Honeyford. You can read the first of several planned posts, “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Current Educational Practice,” here.

This first post aligns a series of arguments about educational practices with media scholar Henry Jenkins’ take on spreadable media. As I explained in a previous post on sleeping alone, Henry considers the conflict between the commodity culture, in which everything is for sale, and the gift economy, in which social capital is developed through the giving and receiving of gifts. I wrote:

Borrowing from Lewis Hyde’s 1983 book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, Jenkins explains that in a gift economy,

[t]he circulation of goods is not simply symbolic of the social relations between participants; it helps to constitute them. Hyde identifies three core obligations which are shared among those who participate in a gift economy: “the obligation to give, the obligation to accept, and the obligation to reciprocate.” (p.xxi) Each of these acts help to break down boundaries between participants, reflecting a commitment to good relations and mutual welfare.

Jenkins takes up Hyde’s notion of the difference between “value” and “worth,” focusing on Hyde’s argument that “a commodity has value… A gift has worth.” Value, in this case, means the exchange rate of a good: Cash for the merchandise. Worth, on the other hand, is the extra-economic value of a good: Its emotional meaning to us.

Given this conflict, then, what spreads via new media–the gifts we give each other (think Kittens, Inspired by Kittens; think the T-Mobile Dance at Liverpool Train Station)–does not always necessarily align with what’s sellable. In other words, what makes something spreadable may exist independent of its economic value. In “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Current Educational Practice,” we argue that

the critiques that Jenkins and colleagues level at prevailing conceptualizations of the transmission and construction of ideas in media have a lot in common with the way instructional routines are transmitted to educators and then presented to students. Traditionally these ideas have been transmitted via textbooks and other formal curricular materials. As with traditional media, this “filter then publish” model made sense given the costs of publishing traditional textbooks and the relatively modest canon of knowledge school children needed to learn but is increasingly cumbersome, ineffectual, and inefficient in an environment that allows for on-demand publishing and dissemination of material. We think that the emerging “publish then filter” media model made possible by digital social networks can revolutionize the way we identify, refine, and share worthwhile curricular practices. We believe that such an approach can accommodate learning needs in a world where the feasibility and usefulness of learning a core body of content is decreasing.

Future blogposts on this topic will explore why disseminated instructional routines (DIR’s), curricula produced and broadly disseminated by initiatives such as the US Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse, will fail to impact education generally or achievement more narrowly, for many of the same reasons that Henry Jenkins argues that corporate attempts to create viral media messages fail as well. We will also introduce and explore the notion of spreadable educational practices (SEP) to consider methods of leveraging the affordances of participatory media to work toward a vision of a participatory classroom structured around a participatory assessment model.

You guys, I think this is gonna be huge. The implications for educators and researchers are enormous, and the implications for media scholars interested in education are equally big. I’m pretty lucky to have the chance to join in on it. In case it wasn’t yet clear, I’m snoopy dancing all over the place over here.

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We win! We win! Or–wait…

Feb 18th, 09 / 1 Comment

This just in: In reaction to protests by its members, Facebook has reversed course on its revised terms of service agreement, returning to the prior terms of service and thereby giving up the ghost on retaining rights to user-posted material even after someone has canceled membership to the site.

This is the new model of civic engagement, a type of activism that goes largely unrecognized by political scientists, cultural theorists, and pollsters but that offers a new model of democratic participation: the struggle over ownership and definition of public spaces, both physical and virtual. It’s hard to identify, harder to measure, because it’s deeply integrated into the everyday activities of an entire generation whose lives, identities, and self-making increasingly extend into virtual spaces.

This is, after all, a generation whose lives are spent in public spaces developed by corporations but marketed as open, democratic spaces where youth are kings of their domains. Think Facebook or MySpace; think YouTube, Google, Hulu. So much of the sense young people make of their world comes from the information gleaned from corporate-sponsored sites; so much of the identity-building happens on sites designed both for this purpose and for a distinct profit to the site developers. It makes sense, then, that civic engagement for this generation involves not voting but negotiating the parameters for engagement in those online spaces. As Jennifer Earl and Alan Shussman argue, in a culture where corporate entities have an increasingly powerful and important role in the lives of citizens, many people “are protesting against corporations themselves in hopes of directly changing corporate policies or products.”

It’s a type of engagement that’s not readily recognized or easily measured. As we’ve seen in the Facebook example, much of the activism&#8212the work that traditionally required, at the very least, leaving the house and convening in a public center (a voting station, a canvassing headquarters, a small African country)&#8212happens without anybody noticing, often least of all the person engaging in the activism. Facebook’s abrupt decision to return to the previous terms of service policy happened because somebody noticed that Facebook had updated its terms of service. That person blogged about it; others linked to the post or wrote about it on their own blogs, which in turn got linked to by others; eventually Facebook members were posting links to the issue on Facebook–thereby using the site as a center for contestation over the site itself. In this case, the distinction between everyday activities (posting interesting links, sharing or commenting on interesting stories) and activism (using Facebook’s affordances to contest a change in its capabilities) is so blurred that it would be difficult to tell where one ended and the other began.

This is what we want, right? A culture in which civic engagement is so seamlessly integrated into the everyday activities that come with being alive that it doesn’t even feel like civic engagement, at least how we traditionally define it?

Chalk one up for the critical mass notion of social movement.

If, however, you prefer cynicism, you can take a look at criticalmass.com, the site for a marketing company whose very purpose is to sell more product by leveraging the affordances of 2.0 technologies. Sadly enough, this is a downright beautiful site&#8212the kind I’d want to spend a lot of time exploring.

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Dissent within the United Republic of Facebook

Feb 17th, 09 / 1 Comment

According to recent measurements, Facebook now has more than 175 million members and is growing by an average of 600,000 new members per day. As marketing analyst Justin Smith points out, “if Facebook were a country, it would now be the 6th most populous in the world.”

Now that we’re country-sized, we should really think about getting a flag and an anthem. And we should seriously consider regulating the recent trend of Facebook members posting self-absorbed notes describing in excruciating detail some of the most boring things imaginable about themselves and then&#8212and this is the part that kills me&#8212tagging other Facebook friends so they’ll read the whole gorram thing. I’m talking to you, 25 Things About Me. To you, My Top 5 Facebook Activities. You, The Soundtrack of My Life.

I suppose it’s only natural that a social media application whose users are largely young (66% are under 35) and largely middle- and upper-class would find a way to use the application’s resources as a platform for talking about themselves as an end goal, not as a means for building and maintaining relationships across time and distance. Is it natural, though? Or is Facebook designed for exactly this purpose, under the guise of social networking?

Carmen Joy King argues that Facebook is actually designed to highlight and enhance self-absorption; she quit Facebook abruptly when, in a search for new quotes for her profile page, she came upon this from Aristotle:”We are what we repeatedly do.” This sent her into self-reflection mode, as she explains:

I became despondent. What, then, was I? If my time was spent changing my profile picture on Facebook, thinking of a clever status update for Facebook, checking my profile again to see if anyone had commented on my page, Is this what I am? A person who re-visits her own thoughts and images for hours each day? And so what do I amount to? An egotist? A voyeur?

Fair enough. Looked at another way, though, all this focus on self-presentation isn’t significantly different from the kinds of identity work young people have always done, with all resources at their disposal. It’s just that no previous generation was able to do it quite so publicly, or with a resource so explicitly designed for statements about identity as, for example, the status message: “Jenna is _______.”

Developmental pyschologist Erik Erikson, taking up the issue of identity formation, argued that identity is “a unity of personal and cultural identity.” For him, identify formation requires active management and reorganization of ideological commitments, identifications, and affiliations. Often, for adolescents and young adults especially, this happens stormily, with rapid reshufflings of value systems before the identity work evens out and “sense of self” becomes increasingly coherent. (Remember those three days you spent as a Communist when you were a college freshman, followed by a week of anarchism and a day or two of religious fanaticism?) Facebook and similar social networking sites have the potential to kind of blow apart this trajectory, especially if current trends continue&#8212Facebook use is increasing most rapidly among women over 55.

I don’t really want to regulate Facebook, of course; I’m kind of a closet libertarian at heart. Besides, a valuable feature of Facebook’s design is that I don’t have to participate in other people’s self-making if I don’t want to. Though my Facebook friends can tag me all they want, I don’t have to read what they write. And I haven’t, for the most part.

In other news, I’ve learned how to use Facebook as a platform for directing traffic to my blog. As of the end of last week, more of my readers have been referred to sleeping alone via Facebook than via any other single referral source. I’m excited that I’ve found such an effective way to leverage Facebook for this purpose.

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The Professor Is Sorry: Or, earn a degree on your iPod in just two months!

Feb 13th, 09 / 1 Comment

I was recently directed to the following TV commercial presented by Kaplan University:

On the one hand, I kinda love the message of this commercial. On the other hand, I want to kill the messenger. Kind of. I think.

The commercial is for Kaplan University, which bills itself as an institution of higher learning dedicated to providing innovative undergraduate, graduate, and continuing professional education. The site proclaims with pride:

Our programs foster student learning with opportunities to launch, enhance, or change careers in a diverse global society. The University is committed to general education, a student-centered service and support approach, and applied scholarship in a practical environment.

What you don’t get from this description is the fact that Kaplan is an online university, also known in some circles as a distance learning institution and in others as a <a href=”http://us.bbb.org/WWWRoot/SitePage.aspx?site=113&id=193afce4-b86b-4e84-adf9-30bfadbe5445&art=4865
” target=”_blank”>diploma mill. Through Kaplan, you can earn degrees ranging from a professional certificate to a master’s degree. You can, for godsake, earn a juris doctorate through Kaplan Online.

In many important ways, of course, this is worrisome. Aside from the fact that a student could ostensibly become, say, a police officer with no field training, there’s also the question of fraud. Fraud. Fraud. Fraud.

On the other hand, the rise in popularity of online universities points to a shift in how we think about expertise. While web 2.0 technologies increasingly allow us to offer expertise in a variety of areas, with or without educational credentials, the desire for evidence of expertise lingers in our collective psyches. Ultimately, we still believe that when our cat’s kidneys start to fail, the single veterinarian who spent 8 years in school followed by years of field experience can provide better advice than the two thousand cat owners on a devoted forum.

There is something to be said for the apprenticeship model of learning, one in which an aspiring neurosurgeon trains under the watchful and caring eye of a senior and more experienced expert. At the same time, however, one of the enormous affordances of participatory culture is that it enables us to tap into collective knowledge and collaborate on continuing to build that knowledge. We might call this collective expertise: All of us are more expert than one of us (especially if we can get the vet to join the forum).

This doesn’t mean I would trust two thousand pet owners to perform surgery on my cat, of course. Collective expertise does not always, after all, exchange at the same rate as apprenticeship, especially when the field requires a high degree of specialization and an intricate web of skills, mindsets, and practices. It does mean, though, that the meanings of “expertise” and, therefore, “credibility” have gotten just a little broader. And it means we need to reconsider what it means to be an “expert,” in professional domains as well as those defined by personal and social affinities.

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It already happened; nobody noticed

Feb 12th, 09 / 4 Comments

This is one of my favorite quotes in the universe:

“There won’t be schools in the future…. I think the computer will blow up the school. That is, the school defined as something where there are classes, teachers running exams, people structured in groups by age, following a curriculum– all of that. The whole system is based on a set of structural concepts that are incompatible with the presence of the computer… But this will happen only in communities of children who have access to computers on a sufficient scale.”–Seymour Papert

My deep, deep sense is that Papert is right. In all significant ways, computers have exploded our established understanding of the cultural value of schools; the only problem is that administrators and policymakers don’t know it yet. The issue runs deep: Given (and I believe it is a given) that school as structured is incompatible with the participatory cultures enabled by digital technologies, what sorts of structures and frameworks can replace the antiquated, industrial-era setup of the school?

It beggars the imagination to think that Papert made the above statement in 1984; 25 years later, we are awash in technologies that must have seemed to him, at best, like glints on the horizon: tools that enable communication, collaboration, and circulation of ideas and creative works. Yet the school as an institution looks very much like it did during the rock ‘n’ roller cola wars and the first term of the Reagan administration. Students still sit in rows, are still required to memorize facts and spit them back out in the form of standardized tests, are not encouraged–and often, not permitted–to access the information and expertise that’s distributed and available across a vast range of media platforms.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MP0APvTSMMw&hl=en&fs=1]

Meanwhile, report after report identifies technology trends and highlights innovative new technologies, without spending a lot of time considering how these technologies may be leveraged to shift the educational landscape. As my colleague Caro Williams exclaims, “If we only talk about what’s available, we aren’t paying enough attention to how technology is re-situating students and people in this strange blend of real and virtual–and THAT’S where this all gets exciting!”

It’s easy enough to identify trends, harder to figure out how those trends mean in the classroom. In many ways, non-school spaces (like news media, transmedia entertainment, and so on) are leading the way in terms of responding to the new affordances of new resources. Perhaps that’s because the question in any production space contains a dependent clause: “What is this new trend, and how can we use it?” Oh! I know–maybe we should turn schools into for-profit spaces where funding is tied to performance! Bwahahahaha brb sobbing over NCLB

ok back

Okay, so if these technologies really are changing what education may mean in the 21st century, why haven’t schools caught on? Pretty simply, because change involves risk; and because when it comes to education, the stakes are really freaking high. What parent, what educator, what researcher would risk tossing children across the gulf between what schools are and what they could–what they must–become?

Yes, a risk is involved (though not necessarily, of course, the risk of dropping kids to their deaths in a bottomless gulch; there is something to be said for hyperbole in moderation, after all). But I believe a risk is what’s required, here at the end of all things.

It’s the struggle of our society, and one that John Dewey pointed to back at the end of the 19th century, when he proposed development of a laboratory school where educators could try out new approaches to teaching and learning. In setting forth a series of arguments about new ways to think about knowing and cognition, he conceded that

[i]t is… comparatively easy to lay down general propositions like the foregoing; easy to use them to criticize existing school conditions; easy by means of them to urge the necessity of something different. But art is long. The difficulty is in carrying such conceptions into effect—in seeing just what materials and methods, in what proportion and arrangement, are available and helpful at a given time…. There is no answer in advance to such questions as these. Tradition does not give it because tradition is founded upon a radically different psychology. Mere reasoning cannot give it because it is a question of fact. It is only by trying that such things can be found out. To refuse to try, to stick blindly to tradition, because the search for the truth involves experimentation in the region of the unknown, is to refuse the only step which can introduce rational conviction into education.

Long revolution, indeed.

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If you’re reading this, you’re my public

Feb 11th, 09 / 4 Comments

I’m obsessed with my new blog. I spend hours devising tactics for directing traffic to it, then I pore over the results over at Google Analytics, where, for example, I can learn that on the first day in the existence of sleeping alone and starting out early, my site had 16 unique visitors and a total of 33 visits (I assume that the 17 extra visits all came from me). I’m aiming upward, upward, upward, and directing my energies toward herding the cats my way.

Why do I care? I mean, other than for the obvious reason that if I’ve spent all this time carefully and lovingly crafting a blogpost I want people to read it? The short answer is that social media makes us consider, and target, our intended audience in more complex ways.

New media guru Howard Rheingold has written about the participatory potential of blogging, explaining that “[b]ecause the public sphere depends on free communication and discussion of ideas, it changes when it scales—as soon as your political entity grows larger than the number of citizens you can fit into a modest town hall, this vital marketplace for political ideas can be influenced by changes in communications technology.”

As bloggers are well aware, the potential is enormous for scaled-up communication via digital technology–but in a real sense, the true potential is never fully realized. It can’t be: Among the constraints and affordances of new media technology is the fact that it enables nearly anyone to become a mediamaker. Cutting through the noise, reaching all members of one’s potential public, is possible in theory but futile in practice. We don’t any of us live anymore in a world where we can expect the person living, working, or studying next to us to have read the same news stories as we have, even though we all have increased access to the news.

That doesn’t mean we can’t try; and, in fact, Rheingold and others point to the “generative” power of public voice in a new media context. He writes:

In one sense, public voice can be characterized not just as active, but as generative—a public is brought into being in a sense by the act of addressing some text in some medium to it. Michael Warner has argued that any particular public (as distinguished from “the public”) comes into being only when it is addressed by a media text, rather than existing a priori—“it exists by virtue of being addressed.” By writing a blog post about an issue, a blogger brings together people whose only common interest is the issue addressed, bringing about “a relation among strangers” that would probably not otherwise exist. Creating a wiki about a local issue has the potential to precipitate a public that can inform itself, stage debates, even organize collective action.

So far on this blog, I’ve published a poem, written about boobies, spoken to my hope for the future of academia, and, now, pleaded for readers. I’m not yet sure who my public is; not yet sure what type of action I’m interested in engaging my public in, other than alerting them to my take on some things that have attracted my attention.

I wonder if I’ll experience this blogging thing like I experienced teaching when I was new to the profession. Often, especially in my first few semesters, I would bluster into the classroom with some vague idea of what I wanted to do, what I wanted to teach; it was only after the class was over that I was able to work out what I was doing and how well I’d done it. I’d go back in the next day armed with just that tiny bit of extra awareness and confidence, which led to increased awareness and confidence, and so on.

For now, I’ll just settle for readers. Please read my blog. You can also comment on it if you like.

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